The study of lawyer films, even
unrealistic lawyer films, therefore can provide an important
supplement to the curriculum by teaching some important lessons.
The most important lesson is that justice counts. The very quantity
of 'law' films demonstrates that the human appetite for justice
is just as strong as our appetites for power and sex.

What Movies Teach Law Students

by John Denvir

We happily note that more and
more law schools are using films in their curriculum. For instance,
here at USF Law School, we are including extended discussions
of the film A Civil Action in our orientation program
for first year students. Now that the study of film has entered
the law school curriculum, perhaps it's time to ask exactly what
it adds to the student's educational experience that the traditional
curriculum lacks.

First,
I think we have to admit that films about lawyers do not give
a very accurate picture of how lawyers actually spend their days.
First of all, most of lawyer films feature trial lawyers while
most practicing lawyers seldom see a courtroom. Secondly, the
most common lawyer film, like To Kill a Mockingbird,
usually tells the story about the idealistic lawyer who represents
an innocent person falsely accused of crime. Practicing criminal
defense attorneys even admit that truly innocent defendants make
up a very small share of their clientele. And finally we also
must admit that movies and television take a great deal of artistic
license with procedural rules, thereby diluting any claim that
these fictions show students how law actually plays out in a
courtroom.

But even if we can't claim
verisimilitude for lawyer films and have to confess that lawyer
films tend to oversimplify messy reality in their pursuit of
a clear battle between good (idealistic lawyer) and evil (corrupt
system), I think we can still persuasively argue that the study
of movies provides an important antidote to the excessively
amoral "professional" model of lawyering that infects
the rest of the curriculum.

If the typical lawyer movie
highlights the human desire for a 'just' result with little
interest in procedural niceties, the professional model concerns
itself primarily with procedures. It assumes that procedural
justice will yield substantive justice, but this assumption ignores
the fact that when the legal resources needed to work the system
are not allocated on a basis even approaching equality, injustice
is often the result. Procedural justice might yield justice
in a society in which all citizens had equal access to the top-flight
lawyers, but this necessary condition is clearly not present
in even our most wealthy societies. For instance, in A Civil
Action, the plaintiffs fail in their suit against two large
companies who allegedly have dumped toxics into the town's drinking
water not because they had the lesser case in law and fact, but
because the defendants had the larger bankroll.

A second element of the professional model is related to this
procedural bias; it holds that we must put our faith in procedures
because there are simply no substantively 'right' answers"
in difficult cases, only arguments which favor plaintiff or defendant.

Convincing law students of the truth of the 'no truth' thesis
seems to be one of the major goals of the first year law school
curriculum. Students must abandon 'fuzzy' thinking and accept
that truth and justice are chimeras. Here's how one law student
put it:
"I made certain naïve emotional and political arguments
before law that I no longer buy into. Part of me feels, well,
there are certain things that are just right and wrong and then
there's another part of me that says, well, wait a minute, things
aren't that simple in the real world and you really can't go
around making silly emotional arguments about what's right and
wrong." 1

But the fact that the truth
is sometimes difficult to determine does not mean that there
is no truth, nor does it mean that all resolutions of a dispute
have a equal claim to the adjective 'just'. The primary goal
of a legal system should be to design systems that allow the
true facts to emerge in complicated situations.

Worse yet, students are led
to believe that their earlier faith in 'emotional arguments'
is a sign of intellectual immaturity and that adoption of the
value-free professional model is a form of personal progress.
I would suggest that (again to use the facts in A Civil Action
as an example) whether or not the defendant corporations polluted
the water that the plaintiffs drank is a factual question to
which a true answer can be found. And if true, the related question
of whether and how much compensation the plaintiffs should receive
from the defendant corporations is a question of justice as well
as law. And finally, acknowledging an emotional dimension to
the assignment of proper legal responsibility to the defendants
for their actions is a not a sign of intellectual immaturity;
instead it is evidence of a richer humanity.

A third element of the professional model is its definition
of "good" and "bad" lawyering solely in
terms of craft skills. Since law is a series of preset procedures
in which plaintiff and defendant wage a form of warfare, and
since there is no right answer to the issues they contest, a
good lawyer is not a hero who obtains justice, but rather an
expert who works the procedures to yield a result favorable to
his client. The professional model pictures lawyers operating
in a morally flattened universe in which craft values dominate.
Once again using A Civil Action as an example, the professional
model would argue that Jerome Facher (Robert Duvall) who keeps
relevant evidence hurtful to his client away from the jury is
the "good" lawyer. Perhaps we need to broaden our
definition of "good."

I don't want to be seen as
merely trashing the professional model; it has its virtues.
Law students need to learn how to think through problems methodically,
not just rushing to embrace emotionally appealing conclusions.
But I do think it gives an unduly amoral view of the lawyer's
role, one which unnecessarily subverts the idealism that brings
many students to choose law as a career in the first place.

The study of lawyer films,
even unrealistic lawyer films, therefore can provide an important
supplement to the curriculum by teaching some important lessons.
The most important lesson is that justice counts. The very quantity
of 'law' films demonstrates that the human appetite for justice
is just as strong as our appetites for power and sex.

Good lawyer films, like To King A Mockingbird and A
Civil Action, also teach a second important lesson: the practice
of law is fraught with ethical consequence. We can still debate
today whether Atticus Finch failed his client in submitting his
fate to a racist state court jury instead of seeking the aid
of the federal court. So too the ethical dilemmas facing Jan
Schlichtmann, the lawyer who represents the families harmed
by toxic water, are worthy of our deepest consideration. Schlichtmann
comes in with a simple goal-- to get as large fee as possible
with as little risk as possible. Yet slowly he discovers he wants
more; he wants to see justice done even though it's not exactly
clear what that concept means in this context. He finds himself
in a quandary. If he "takes the money and runs" as
he originally planned, he is no more than the "ambulance
chaser" the defense lawyers think him. But if he proceeds
with the case, he puts his clients, his partners, and himself
at financial risk. It's not easy for Schlichtmann or the viewer
to to balance these conflicting considerations, especially since
they don't calibrate on the same measure, but I think discussion
of a movie like A Civil Action can teach students that
the some of the most challenging parts of being a lawyer start
just where the professional model leaves off. 1.Quoted
in R. Granfield, Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard
and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1992) 80.

Posted August 25, 2003

Would
you like to comment on this article? Please submit your comments
here.